Tip of The Week : Git explorer
January 28, 2019

Every week during our friday team meeting we share a tip of the week at Flow Pilots. Sharing is caring so we would love to share our most valuable tips with you.

What is git?

If you’re not a developer or someone surrounded by IT-geeks it is not unlikely that you’ve never heard of “Git”. Git has many facets and can be discussed quite intensively but I will try to explain it as simple as possible. Git is a free version control system designed to handle projects with large amounts of code lines efficiently. It is used by developers to keep control of changes and versioning it along the way. It is also by far the most widely used control system in the world.

The system was originally created by Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux) in 2005 for development of the Linux kernel. He created this because there was no system that fitted his needs. He focused on simple design, speed and strong support for non-linear development. By now Git has become the worldwide standard for version control.

Why is it so popular?

Different developers can work on the same projects without making changes in each other’s work. Imagine working on a group project with two of your classmates. You share a Word document and everyone starts editing it at the same time. You may lose a lot of content because everyone overrides each other’s changes or everyone ends up with a different version of the same task. Git is the perfect solution for large group projects with one wished result.

Git explorer

Last but not least, our tip of the week : The Git explorer created by Dante Lex. An online tool that helps users find the right command without having to dig through the web. It’s useful for developers who work through terminal instead of a git client. Git explorer is a library of instructions that will make the hard life of every developer a little bit easier. Some reactions of happy developers who decided to give it a go :

“Very useful, I like the single clear solution that comes up for each query, and the notes that accompany the command.”

“Nice git cheatsheet, especially if you do some operations in the terminal rarely and always forget corresponding command/arg name (like I do).”